The rapid growth in data intensive applications continues to fuel the demand for raw data storage capacity. As companies rely more and more on e-commerce, online transaction processing, and databases, the amount of information that needs to be managed and stored can be massive. As a result, the ongoing need to add more storage, service more users, and back-up more data has become a daunting task.
To meet this growing demand for data, the concept of the Storage Area Network (SAN) has been gaining popularity. A SAN is defined by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) as a network whose primary purpose is the transfer of data between computer systems and storage elements and among storage elements. Unlike connecting a storage device directly to a server, e.g., with a SCSI connection, and unlike adding a storage device to a LAN with a traditional interface such as Ethernet (e.g., a NAS system), the SAN forms essentially an independent network that does not tend to have the same bandwidth limitations as its direct-connect SCSI and NAS counterparts and also provides increased configurability and scalability.
More specifically, in a SAN environment, storage devices (e.g., tape drives and RAID arrays) and servers are generally interconnected via various switches and appliances. The connections to the switches and appliances are usually Fibre Channel. This structure generally allows for any server on the SAN to communicate with any storage device and vice versa. It also provides alternative paths from server to storage device. In other words, if a particular server is slow or completely unavailable, another server on the SAN can provide access to the storage device. A SAN also makes it possible to mirror data, making multiple copies available and thus creating more reliability in the availability of data. When more storage is needed, additional storage devices can be added to the SAN without the need to be connected to a specific server; rather, the new devices can simply be added to the storage network and can be accessed from any point.
An example of a SAN is shown in the system 100 illustrated in the functional block diagram of FIG. 1. As shown, there are one or more servers 102. Three servers 102 are shown for exemplary purposes only. Servers 102 are connected through an Ethernet connection to a LAN 106 and/or to a router 108 and then to a WAN 110, such as the Internet. In addition, each server 102 is connected through a Fibre Channel connection to each of a plurality of Fibre Channel switches 112 sometimes referred to as the “fabric” of the SAN. Two switches 112 are shown for exemplary purposes only. Each switch 112 is in turn connected to each of a plurality of SAN appliances 114. Two appliances 114 are shown for exemplary purposes only. Each appliance is also coupled to each of a plurality of storage devices 116, such as tape drives, optical drives, or RAID arrays. In addition, each switch 112 and appliance 114 is coupled to a gateway 118, which in turn is coupled to router 108, which ultimately connects to a Wide Area Network (WAN) 118, such as the Internet. FIG. 1 shows one example of a possible configuration of a SAN 119, which includes switches 112, appliances 114, storage devices 116, and gateways 118. Still other configurations are possible. For instance, one appliance may be connected to fewer than all the switches.
Appliances 114 perform the storage management of the SAN. When the appliance 114 receives data, it stores the data in a memory in the appliance. Then, with a processor (also in the appliance), analyzes and operates on the data in order to forward the data to the correct storage device(s). This store-and-forward process typically slows down data access.
While the appliances do perform some switching, because there may be a large number of servers (many more than three), and because each appliance has few ports (usually only two or four), switches 112 are needed to connect the many servers to the few appliances. Nevertheless, switches 112 have little built-in intelligence and merely forward data to a selected appliance 114. One limitation of appliances is the fact that many appliances often have a limited or set number of ports. Adding ports to an appliance, although possible, is typically very expensive. Every one or two ports are supported by an expensive CPU or server card. So generally to add ports, entire file cards (which perform virtualization and store-and-forward functions) must be added to the device, which is usually very costly. In the alternative, appliances are simply added to the SAN, but again, this tends to be very costly.
In addition, SANs, usually in the appliances 114, generally perform a function known as “virtualization.” Virtualization occurs when space on one or more physical storage devices is allocated to a particular user, but the physical location of that space remains unknown to the user. For instance, a user may access its company's “engineering storage space,” ENG:, accessing and “seeing” the virtual space ENG: as he or she would access or “see” an attached disk drive. Nonetheless, the ENG: space may be divided over several physical storage devices or even fragmented on a single storage device. Thus, when a server requests a virtual device (e.g., ENG:) and block number, the appliance must determine the device(s) that physically correlate to the virtual device requested and direct the data accordingly.
Although SANs were introduced several years ago, interoperability problems, lack of available skills, and high implementation costs remain major obstacles to widespread use. For instance, SANs as they currently exist have high deployment costs and high management costs. Referring again to FIG. 1, each switch, appliance, and gateway typically come from different vendors, creating a lack of management standards that has resulted in the proliferation of vendor-specific management tools. As a result, to deploy a SAN, equipment must be purchased from multiple vendors. And, as shown in FIG. 1, each switch, appliance, gateway, storage device, server, and router will have its own management, shown as management stations 120. Although independent physical management stations are shown, it is to be understood that independent management is frequently in the form of independent, vendor-specific software on a single computer but which software does not communicate with one another. As a result, there is no centralized management of the SAN and its management costs are high given that there are usually multiple management stations that frequently require many people to manage.
In addition, “provisioning” of (or “creating”) virtual targets for SANs has become burdensome. When a new virtual target needs to be created, a human administrator must first determine the application requirements for the data, such as performance, capacity required initially plus that required for potential growth, data availability, and data protection. More specifically, the administrator must allocate all or part of one or more physical devices to the virtual target and configure those devices to produce the best performance as well as access control for data security. The administrator must further assure the routes through the storage network have the level of availability required and may have to install alternate pathing if high availability is required so that if one path goes down another path to the target is available. Finally, the administrator must test the environment to verify the functionality before making the virtual target accessible. Overall, it may take several days or even weeks to create such a virtual target—a time period that is often unacceptable to users of the SAN.